Six steps to optimize your marketing

Why aren't organizations realizing the full value of their marketing optimization solutions? What are the most common pitfalls marketers encounter as they adopt it? What's needed for effective marketing optimization?

To answer these questions and more, here are six best practices offered by Amartya Bhattacharjya, a Principal Solutions Architect at SAS and expert in marketing optimization, and Hillary Ashton, former Director of Customer Intelligence for SAS.

Amartya Bhattacharjya, a Principal Solutions Architect at SAS and expert in marketing optimization.

1. Data is the foundation – so invest in it

For many marketers, data is inherently problematic. It may be scattered all over their organization – or worse, they don’t even know about the data that’s available to them. Specific to optimization, marketers need to collect and centralize data that helps them understand:

The prioritization rules, business rules, or customer rules that your organization may be applying right now (to the extent they can be documented and codified).

Predictive models, as determined by the types of optimiza¬tion sought (for example, if you’re trying to maximize the responses, you would need response models in place, not your profitability model).

2. Define what you want to optimize given specific constraints

Before you start the process, you need to define exactly what you want to optimize. “For example, if you want to optimize ROI, you need to clearly define and quantify what you mean by ROI, including the rules and constraints that you want to satisfy,” adds Bhattacharjya. These constraints are inputs that go into the optimization process.

3. Deploy the right enabling technology

It’s one thing to have the technology – or the analytic capability – in place, and it’s another to know how to get the most from it. “I recommend that companies seek out expert guidance from someone who has successfully applied this technology and optimization process before,” says Bhattacharjya. “It’s important that you have folks available – a trusted partner who can give you a helping hand as you craft your problem, identify the data needed to get you going, and move from step A to step B, and so on.”

4. Facilitate a mind shift at management levels

For many marketing departments, adopting optimization requires a mind shift – especially for business managers and product managers used to offer-centric or customer-centric approaches. The best way to achieve this is to secure top-down sponsorship at high levels of management, as the approach is meant to optimize marketing across all lines of business and all campaigns. “The interests of these sponsors need to transcend specific lines of business and product lines,” says Bhattacharjya. “They can also revise incentive structures and performance metrics for product line managers so that they are better aligned with the goals of optimization.”

5. Create a customer contact council

Consider creating a customer contact council – product line managers who get together regularly to compare the campaigns they have planned and synchronize them optimally. Ideally, this group would be led by someone with oversight for all products across the enterprise.

Hillary Ashton, former Director of Customer Intelligence for SAS.

6. Jump-start adoption by exploiting your existing CRM system

CRM systems not only capture valuable customer data, but also structure the operating parameters that affect the available data for marketing to use. Both are important prerequisites for adopting marketing optimization.

In light of what holistic marketing optimization does – satisfy all existing business rules while determining the best combination of customers and segments to achieve your goals – it enables you to apply intelligent decision making to CRM data without disrupting your CRM system. “Use it to revise the decisions made regarding which customer gets what campaign or offer,” says Ashton. “Your optimization solution can then feed results back into your CRM system.”